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30 Under 30: Meet The Young Talent Behind The Next Industrial Revolution

At 26 years old, Ben Kaufman is already a successful entrepreneur twice over. In high school, he founded Mophie, an iPod accessory company he sold in 2006. Two years later, he founded Quirky, which is disrupting the manufacturing world by relying on crowd input and a 3D printer to rapidly develop household gadgets.

With $50 million in revenues and $170 million in venture funding, Kaufmann’s Quirky is mature compared to most of the start-ups on our annual list of 30 Under 30. But the disruptors, innovators and entrepreneurs who made this year’s list in 15 different categories share one goal: they all want to change the world.

Kaufman is one of the stars in the Energy & Industry category, a broad swath that includes talented scientists, engineers, marketers and technology professionals in an array of fields. Energy & Industry’s 30 Under 30 ranges from a woman who found how to get energy from a soccer ball to a teenage nuclear prodigy who is designing nuclear fission reactors.

If there’s a common thread among them, it’s the desire to find more efficient, sustainable and less costly ways of doing things.

Three on our list — Raphael Rosen, 29, president of Carbon Lighthouse, Andrew Krioukov, 26, co-founder of Building Robotics, and David Cohen-Tanugi, 26, an MIT graduate student who started Wristify — are all developing ways to reduce energy consumption in buildings.

Daniel Maren, Andrew Ponec and Darren Hau, the 20-year-old co-founders of Dragonfly Systems, are working to make solar panel systems cheaper, more efficient and reliable.

In industrial manufacturing, Vince Alessi, 25, founder of Covaron Advanced Materials, invented a new ceramic-like matter that is produced using far less energy than traditional ceramics yet is strong enough to replace steel, aluminum and certain plastics in all kinds of industrial applications.

Bill Pulte, 25, manages Pulte Capital Partners, a Michigan-based private equity firm that invests in building products companies ($30 million in revenues and 200 employees in all). But in his spare time, he’s introducing efficiency to the process of blight removal in Detroit, using mass demolition tactics to restore order and improve safety in some of the city’s worst neighborhoods.

Some of those on Energy & Industry’s 30 Under 30 are just plain fun. The four buddies from Madison, Wisc., behind Pure Fix Cycles — Austin Stoffers, Jordan Schau, Michael Fishman and Zach Schau – just wanted some basic bikes at a decent price. Their lightweight, no-frills, no-brakes, fixed-gear bikes generated $4 million in revenues in 2012.

Aaron Firestein, 28, discovered on trip to South America that he could make money selling $65 canvas sneakers imprinted with colorful designs from street artists. His Chicago-based company, Bucketfeet, now has $1 million in revenues.

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